StorageCraft: The Early Years (Part two)

StorageCraft: The Early Years (Part two)

Above image is our logo featuring our old slogan “Leading the way to safer computer.”

StorageCraft has changed a lot in our 10-year history. We’ve grown a lot, particularly in the last five years, and with that growth has come a lot of ups and downs. One thing that has not changes is our sense of humor.

In my last post, I shared a story about the attempted robbery at our offices, and how it was foiled. During the incident, CTO Scott Barnes surprised one of the would-be thieves. The guy then asked Scott, “Have you seen my brother Wally?” Then he bolted out of the office.

Probably because they didn’t get away with anything, the whole episode provided some much-needed comic relief over the next few months. We were right in the midst of creating StorageCraft ShadowProtect, our flagship backup software. We released ShadowProtect IT Edition just a few months later, in September 2005. VP of Marketing and Business Development, Curt James, started traveling to all kinds of trade shows to tell people about our cool software. Right away, people saw how easy it was to use, and the sales started coming in.

Once you have sales, you also need support. Unfortunately, at that time there just wasn’t enough money to hire support technicians. So Scott and Brandon Nordquist, VP of Product Management, provided our technical support in the early days. To keep their anonymity– and probably to keep themselves amused–they adopted pseudonyms for their support alter egos. Brandon became “Rick” and Scott became “Wally.” After that, if someone asked about Wally, we figured it was a support call and not a robbery attempt.

Fortunately for Scott and Brandon, ShadowProtect was such a success we hired technical support staff a few months later.

In my next post about StorageCraft in the early years, I’ll share some guerrilla marketing stories. Well, marketing on a shoestring.

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